His name is Eric Smith. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is an international consultant, a public speaker, a commissioner with the Texas Judicial Commission on Mental Health, and a board member of the Schizophrenia and Psychosis Action Alliance. He is the kind of person you would be glad to have in any room.
He is also a high school dropout who was once living out of his car, convinced he had been recruited as a federal asset to prevent the assassination of two world leaders.
Both of those people are the same man. And the distance between them is the story of what this series has been trying to explain.
Part I: Before
To understand what happened to Eric Smith, you have to start where he started.
"Elementary school — these were, without question, the golden years of my earlier life. I was studying piano, making great grades. I was handpicked, when I was a young man living in San Diego, to be on the student council. It was just two people per class, so it was quite an honor. And I was very active. I had a lot of friends. In short, like my parents could have just high-fived each other and said, wow, we're killing it as parents. Look how well things are going with our son, Eric." — Eric Smith
The grades slipped in middle school. Then in high school, the Fs came. The school asked the right questions — is there conflict at home? Is he using drugs? — and got the right answers. But no one asked the question that mattered.
"I don't think it was on anybody's short list that it was serious mental illness that was bubbling up and becoming a thing. But that is what was happening." — Eric Smith
Eventually, Eric's parents had him tested. After several hours of standardized evaluation, a clinician called the family into his office.
"Mr. and Mrs. Smith, your son's answers are consistent with that of a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And don't be surprised if he falls ill with some sort of psychosis by his mid-20s. That sounded insane to me at the time." — Eric Smith
That is exactly what happened.
Part II: The Descent
The years between that warning and its fulfillment were not quiet. Eric dropped out of high school, earned a GED, attempted college, got hired by a Fortune 200 company where he consistently ranked among its top performers — all while battling a substance use disorder that was itself, in part, a response to symptoms no one had yet fully named.
By his mid-20s, sober and living alone, something else began.
"I started to get, it was paranoia first. And then it was 'people are watching me' next. And then it was, you know, where are their cameras — I don't know where they're at, but I'm definitely being watched by someone." — Eric Smith
In the early days of social media — when Twitter had maybe 15,000 users worldwide — Eric began to see patterns in the messages that were not there. Famous musicians were responding to his posts. World leaders were appearing on the same platform. And then, in the architecture of those early tweets, he became convinced he had found something no one else had seen.
"I felt like I stumbled onto a code that was about assassination attempt plots that were specifically going to happen to our then-president, Obama, and the Queen of Jordan, to destabilize the West and start World War III." — Eric Smith
"I did what any sane person would do — which I'm saying sarcastically. I Googled the FBI's phone number and I called them." — Eric Smith
The FBI met with him. Multiple times. He showed up with a yellow legal pad's worth of evidence. He brought diamond rings he had acquired — believing the government was bankrolling his efforts. He sat in the FBI's offices in San Antonio, tears running down his face, and explained to the agents why they were now going to have to kill his family.
"I'm an asset working for you guys now. And now that I'm that, if ever I have family around that's still alive, they could get captured and kidnapped and used as leverage against me — so that I'm spilling out the secrets. So isn't that just how it goes? Don't you just kill the families of everybody that are the assets?" — Eric Smith
The agents asked, delicately, whether he was diagnosed with any mental health conditions, whether he was taking any prescribed medications. Eric heard what they were really saying.
"I'm not stupid. I'm psychotic. So at the time I start getting furious. I know what they're getting at. They're trying to tell me I'm a crazy person." — Eric Smith
And then his mind completed the circle. The FBI must be in on it too. They were trying to get him to stop, but he would not stop.
While Eric was moving through this world — living out of his car, speeding down the highway convinced he was outrunning spies, meeting with federal agents he believed he was directing — his parents were making phone calls. Doing the only thing they knew how to do, which was everything.
Eric's mother remembers what those years looked like from the outside.
"Would my super intelligent, genius son ever be able to form a sentence? It was really — I can cry, thinking about it now — because it was devastating. And all the medications, all that were tried, and they'd work for a little while, and then they didn't. And... it was... it was a hard road." — Eric's mother
The first response, as with many families, was disbelief.
"There was denial, quite honestly, at the very beginning of that." — Eric's father Brad Smith
"We became desperate — going from psychiatrists to psychiatrists, and Eric being rejected as a patient. What do we do? And we're not giving up on him." — Brad Smith
Eventually, Eric's most recent psychiatrist — the one who had fired him as a patient for being too difficult to treat — got on the phone with his parents and told them something shocking.
"You have to have your son arrested for a low-level nonviolent offense — we... were at a crossroads in our mind to where we have to do something. But it was almost a relief. It became a relief. But it did not relieve the feeling you saw of your son being led away in handcuffs. Because we know what his heart was like — meaning his soul — and what was there. It was an illness. But he had to go through that. And we didn't know what that was going to be." — Brad Smith
And then the police came to Eric's parents' house. Eric was charged with trespassing. He was handcuffed. He went willingly — because he believed, in his certainty, that federal assets outrank local police, and that the government must need him in jail for a reason.
Inside the jail, Eric was placed in solitary confinement. Not because he was dangerous in any conventional sense. Because the other inmates refused to be around him.
"I was thrown in solitary, specifically because all the other real scary dudes around me were like, yo, we don't want to go to sleep around Eric. We don't want to be around him. This guy is saying some wild stuff. And so I was thrown in solitary because other people didn't feel safe around me. That is how different of a person I am when I am not medicated for my symptoms — that the truly scary people are afraid of me. It's totally backwards." — Eric Smith
His parents begged the jail not to release him.
"He would have been released to the streets because he had no prior convictions, nothing, no arrests. There was nothing on his record ever. And they were going to release him..." — Nancy Smith
When his parents pushed — pleaded — asked what the plan was for his care upon release, the jail's response was this:
"Well, you know, when Eric gets out, he can panhandle. He can use that money to, you know, buy meds or whatever it is he needs. And he can sleep under a bridge. Which is not a discharge plan for psychosis. It's not a discharge plan for any medical condition — and definitely not a discharge plan for psychosis." — Eric Smith
Then a judge heard about the case. A court liaison was sent to the solitary wing. She couldn't get into where Eric was being held. She stood on the other side and talked to him through the barrier.
Eric remembers her to this day — and the specific words she used.
"Eric, you know, I'm here from the hospital and there's some energy about you at the hospital and we're just trying to figure out — do you belong in jail, or do you need some help? Because some people might belong in jail. But is it you? Do you need help? Is this a medical thing?" — Court liaison
The court liaison went back. And what happened next changed the trajectory of Eric Smith's life.
"I was plucked from jail, and I was transferred to the San Antonio State Hospital, where I stayed for three months involuntarily. And after those three months, I stepped down into AOT for the first time." — Eric Smith
He was placed in a conference room — not a courtroom. Around a table sat a psychiatrist, a social worker, a defense attorney, a county attorney and a judge. Judge Oscar Kazen was not wearing a robe. He was there in ordinary clothes, at one end of an ordinary table, with a simple question: what does this person need?
"It was the absolute first time that I had ever seen authority used in a way that wasn't there to punish." — Eric Smith
For 10 years, every doctor, every counselor, every judge had operated in a separate lane. Here, for the first time, they were all in the same room — working from the same facts, toward the same goal. On Eric's behalf.
"There was this judge talking to this treatment team — for the benefit of me. And I had never had that experience before. And it really cut through the heart of things." — Eric Smith
Something shifted. Not all at once. Not without resistance. But something shifted.
"You know what? I am gonna take the meds." — Eric Smith
Kazen has sat at thousands of those tables. He has seen illness arrive at every income level, every neighborhood, every family structure. He has one way of describing what it does to the people surrounding the person who is sick.
"When mental illness strikes, it strikes anyone. It's like a dark creature coming out of a closet in the middle of the night. It is a hand grenade that goes off and the shrapnel hits everyone. It destroys — serious mental illness, untreated mental illness — destroys the human soul that's suffering it. It knocks the family member standing next to them completely off their heels." — Judge Oscar Kazen
He has a particular tenderness for the parents. He has watched them arrive in his courtroom carrying something no one told them they didn't have to carry.
"I have never met one that hasn't, in the middle of a dark night, looked up at the ceiling and stared and wondered, and asked themselves — what did I do? What could I have done different? How did I cause this?" — Judge Oscar Kazen
His answer to that question is always the same.
"This is not your fault. Your son or daughter would be exactly in this position — whether you were an angel or the devil yourself. This is not your fault." — Judge Oscar Kazen
And his motto, the one he tells every person who sits across from him at that table, is the clearest distillation of what the system is supposed to be for.
"You may fail the system. But I'll be damned if I let the system fail you." — Judge Oscar Kazen
Eric's mother found her own version of that assurance — not in a courthouse, but in a phone number.
"It was supportive for us because we know we could call. We did have Judge Kazen's phone number, and he took my call. I called many times, and he was there. I can't imagine if it hadn't been Judge Kazen." — Nancy Smith
Smith went through the AOT program three times.
"Eric Smith is one of the kids that came through. Eric was not an immediate success. He went through my program a couple of times. We had to keep pulling him back and getting him to a point where wellness became his habit. But he's an example of many." — Judge Oscar Kazen
"My parents — from the time I was in my early teens, for pretty much like a whole decade forward — my dad would miss a lot of work taking me to appointments, my mom missing work, taking me to appointments. Both of them throwing time and love and money and energy and all these resources trying to get me help. And they were being essentially forced to wear de facto hats of pharmacists, social workers, psychiatrists, counselors — because society just wasn't prepared to meet my needs. And so my parents were forced into this position where nothing they could do could really help. Until AOT came into my life." — Eric Smith
Eric Smith does not describe what happened to him as a miracle. He describes it as the consequence of a system that, at a critical moment, chose to treat him as a person rather than a problem.